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04 April 2022

Double win for faculty PhD students in the King's Outstanding Thesis Prize

Two Faculty PhD students awarded highly competitive prize for their excellent theses.

Awards

The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care is delighted to congratulate two former PhD students - Dr Ed Baker and Dr Sarah McAllister - for each winning a King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize.

The prizes are highly competitive, with only a limited number awarded across the year. This is also the first time in the last five years the prize has been awarded to students in the Faculty, so celebrating two winners for their outstanding doctoral theses this year is extra special.

Dr Ed Baker’s thesis proposes a pathway-based intervention development toolkit for local trauma hospitals to use when constructing a standardised approach to discharge for patients who experience blunt thoracic injuries. It also highlights opportunities to optimise self-care for these patients.

His supervisors were Gerry Lee, Chris Norton and Andreas Xyrichis and Philip Hopkins (external supervisor).

Receiving the news that my thesis had been awarded a King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize was a wonderful and welcome surprise. I’m very proud to be able to represent the Faculty and the King’s College Hospital Emergency Department through my work and research and am incredibly grateful to my examiners and supervisors for their wonderful support throughout this process.

Dr Ed Baker

Dr Sarah McAllister’s thesis set out to understand and improve nurse-patient therapeutic engagement on acute mental health wards by co-designing a complex behavioural change intervention. The thesis makes unique and important contributions to the literature on therapeutic engagement, and has developed a new, co-designed model of engagement that has subsequently been used in local and national policy to guide nurses’ practice.

Her supervisors were Professor Glenn Robert, Professor Alan Simpson and Dr Vicki Tsianakas.

It’s an honour to be awarded a King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize; it’s wonderful to receive recognition for all the hard work that has gone into this thesis. I owe a special thanks to my supervisors for supporting me through the process, and to my examiners, Beth Fylan and Mick McKeown, for nominating me.

Dr Sarah McAllister

The King’s Outstanding Thesis Prizes are nominated by the external examiners who assess research theses and judged by a panel consisting of the Director of Research Talent and the Chair of the Research Degrees Examinations Board.

Both theses are available to view via King’s College London’s Research Portal:

In this story

Gerry Lee

Reader in Advanced Clinical Practice

Christine Norton

Professor of Clinical Nursing Research

Glenn Robert

Vice Dean (Research & Impact) and Head of Division, Methodologies

Alan Simpson

Professor of Mental Health Nursing